


Death in the Deathless Land:

by TheLightdancer



Category: Cthulhu Mythos - H. P. Lovecraft, DCU (Comics), The Sandman (Comics)
Genre: Eldritch Abomination, Eldritch Abominations (Cthulhu Mythos), Lovecraftian Monster(s), Psychological Horror, Reality Warping is not a toy, Surreal horror, The God on the Gilded Throne is her own warning, cosmic horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-17
Updated: 2021-02-11
Packaged: 2021-03-15 13:56:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 21,969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28814526
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLightdancer/pseuds/TheLightdancer
Summary: In between universes, Death of the  Endless has a very unfortunate mishap in trying to go to a specific destination. When she awakens she finds herself in a gilded and ivory place, a deathless and opulent empire presided over by a mad Goddess. In a realm where her sphere does not exist, reliant only on her native power and prowess and wit, Death of the Endless must do something unusual for her. Escape a realm before it consumes her as it has so many things.
Relationships: No Romantic Relationship(s)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 3





	1. Prologue: 'And I looked and I beheld a new heavens and a new Earth'.

_In Between Universes:_

It was the thirteen thousandth time that Death had lived another iteration of her life with her siblings' lives interwoven. In this one she had fought her destiny at first by refusing to enter reality at all, another where she'd tossed her ankh and lived in the realm between the worlds. The ankh had been taken up by mortals who were never meant to bear it, and in this world it was the origin of Nekron, of the Black Racer, of the Black Flash, of all the little-deaths who had been those who had taken the ankh and sought to wield it as specific faces of herself. She had fought it, too, by it being one of the worlds where she was taken captive by Roderick Burgess instead of Dream, making him evolve down a different path rather than choosing the easy way out of suicide in such a spectacular wasteful set of theatrics that would see him forget and learn nothing as it was.

And yet in the end nothing had truly changed. Dream had come to rescue her where she had avoided Burgess in other worlds less for the fear that he might harm her and more that her mask might slip in front of her brother and then things could become much worse if he saw what was there and tried to help her as he was. In that he was better than her. It started him down the very path she had sought to avoid for him and all else had followed.

She was weary and she was exhausted, lives upon lives weighing down on her, so many iterations of seeking to change things only to decipher that the Book of Destiny was more nearly prison than anything else, and that to break it would make her no different at one level to the other horrors lurking beyond.

It was in that sense of weariness and distraction, her tapestry tied to a stick in the manner of her dearly missed and lamented brother Destruction that she missed the thing that tilted this path down something she understood all too intimately and in the future would enable her to twice defy and ultimately ensure the divided attentions of a creature would turn away from her corner of existence altogether.

The thing that shambled toward her out of the darkness was immense, a vast and ovoid structure of endless tendrils coated in gnashing mouths, whispering a hundred thousandfold blasphemies.

_Y'shggg n'gai Yog-Sothoth!_

The last blasphemy was the one that froze her. An invocation of the Silver Key, that which lurked beyond universes, that which she had encountered in the flesh, at a very loose sense of the term after the first universe, where her fears of her own ending had faded irrevocably and a much greater horror lurked. She knew this one. One of Yog-Sothoth's various demigod-spawn, banished by a scientist who had achieved an improbable feat primarily because the fledglings were not gifted in congealing their newborn flesh with physics and because his wiser, more brilliant twin had fallen to that failure and the impact of fear of canids.

He was immense, he had grown far greater than that day on Sentinel Hill outside Dunwich itself.

That half-formed face crossed the upper part of the egg, much wider than before. It had long eyes with slit pupils and irises, a stretched nose akin to a Neanderthal, whispy straggly half-formed beards. The thing did not move so much as slither and she stared in blank shock. It dawned on her too late that she was paralyzed with that shock too long when the ovoid hurled out tendrils that pierced her flesh.

Iridescent silver blood spurted outward from her side and her arm and she shrieked in pain, so unusual a situation that she was further paralyzed by the sheer novelty of the thing. She could hurt herself, she had done so in vain attempts to thwart her long life. And now here, the world's biggest and foulest rotten eye had done much more of what she had expected than she had imagined. She felt her silver blood draining and being sucked into the beast's tendrils, a venom flowing into her veins and making her very essence weaken.

Her dark eyes flashed in wrath and she spoke a single Word of Power, one of many that were hers, not Dream's. Unlight severed some of the tendrils and the beast shrieked in wrath, as four tendrils grew where the first had been. Bleeding from gaping wounds on her left side above her hip, on her right side just beneath her right breast, on her arms in four to five places and just beneath her knees, she knelt and formed a rune that would let her escape.

The Horror's tendrils surged downward just as she phased through the circle she had summoned, and its roars of disappointment were met by mocking laughter from her.

Then she realized she was falling, not flying, over a vast area, gilded and ivory. She sought to call upon the fullness of her strength to move to another place or at least to cushion her fall, but the wounds bled too much and the venom she was purging was taking too much of her strength to purge and to call upon the rest. She was mighty, in most ways the most powerful single being in her universe for she would be last and she would be first and only for all time for a very long time.

Down she fell from the sky over the gilded citadel, fires burning and cauterizing her wounds and burning away portions of her clothing.

As she fell she felt for a moment the impression of malevolent eyes watching her and a presence drawn straight to her mind.

And then with a loud crunching sound and a spray of gilded-ivory ground and a cloud of white smoke she did land and in the impact there was a merciful lack of awareness.


	2. Chapter I: The God on the Gilded Throne

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The God on the Gilded Throne grasps what has fallen into her realm. 
> 
> Death finds herself awake and injured, in a place unknown and unknowable.

_Throneroom, Citadel of the Temple Azarath:_

She had been half-human, once. Product of an assignation between an alien star-god and a mortal woman. 

She had been Jewish, once, in an ancestry that took pride in escaping slavery, whose first ancestors were born to a woman who thwarted cheating of her destiny by hiding within the garments of a whore to seduce Judah himself.

She did not remember nor elect to remember the lineage of Julia Domina bar the occasional return to her homeworld, searching for what could never be found, uncomprehending and uncaring of what her presence there unleashed.

She had believed herself the hero, once, destined to slay great Azar herself, the Undying Flame, the unholy force that opposed the Angra Mainyu. To be the great witch, who would face the demonic queen and slay it. And all she had done had brought her here.

She sat on a gilded throne, God in a total sense, unrelenting and absolute.

Hunger was her motivation, a screw that could never be satisfied, for it was a vengeful and self-destructive impulse. Alone among her kind, she ached to abandon the deathless ways of the Oath. She was mad and a mad hunger compelled her to cast her gaze across the fourteen thousand universes she had devoured and reshaped. Everything here, from the smallest sub-atomic particles to the great galactic superclusters reshaped in her image. Opulent without, rotting within, propelled by the ceaseless longing that could never be gratified and vengeful and murderous that it could not.

Deathless. A simple word and a simple concept. Ever-young and never aging, magick like blood in the veins that grew more potent and more powerful with age.

Deathless. A Goddess who had eradicated free will and the concept of life other than herself in her sphere, and was a loyal enough thrall to the accursed Oath that that she longed for was not permitted within her realm.

Deathless. The child once born to Julia Domina of Sepharad who had had congress with an alien warlord in human guise was now a woman, still a fledgling by the eternal life of her kind.

Fourteen thousand universes had sated her hunger and been reshaped, conquered individually or by her rousing her power to raise her great Army of Azarath to storm them, to wage wars that were merely exercises in sadism, for what was caught in her snares, could with very few exceptions leave it.

She caught glimpses in the future of a being of bone-hued skin with eyes of brilliant burning gold, wielding a terrible power and of a new war that would follow, her vengeful hate and desperate hope creating a new war.

Universes writhed in torment from the smallest portions of them to the greatest, hating themselves as she hated herself, the hatred so powerful and so virulent that it warmed the fell impulses motivating her existence. Nothing here was not herself, the viral aspect of her being had ensured such. What she destroyed, what she rebuilt, it was her means of punishing herself for her failure and of lashing out against an uncaring universe until something greater finally did notice and ended the obscenity she represented, at one level. At another she had arisen as a nightmare as the Firstborn of Chaos and relished and savored in destruction for its own sake, glorying in the ease with which hope came to the few and the lost and the damned when they knew that she would not kill them, and in the various elements of that hope subverted, ruined.

Infinities of infinities in her grasp, as she was Tyranny, she was Avarice, she was Empire and Empire Dreams. And as with all that lay within the rotten core of her being, they could never truly be satisfied nor satiated, and at its core a death wish, and an impulse that something, anything could and should destroy her and remove the obscenity of her existence but if it failed, she was of the Deathless and there would be much more creative elements. Death severed body and soul, and violations of the flesh of various kinds were....unimaginative. The stunted work of weak gods and goddesses whose imaginations were hindered by serving human roots.

To defile the very innate nature of beings, to grant them their greatest wishes and fulfilling them in the most dreadful and horrific fashions...to grant them eternity knowing that they had become their own antithesis and gloried in what was hitherto anathema, that was her being. And it was in this sense of watching a singularity made to vomit up that which it had devoured and doing so in a manner in the soundless void as if it were a great maw with a terrible smile that her being froze. There was a tear ripped into an element of her world and her eyes turned to a being who in a desperate shout of semi-delirious pain hurled a stick with an object through a portal and fell to the ground with a smile on her face.

Atmospheric burn was enabled to test the hardiness of the creature, and it endured. She burned but she was not consumed, and then she landed with a crunch and a cloud of white smoke not far from her Citadel.

Initially, the God on the Gilded Throne remained gazing for a moment and then shrugged.

Whatever it was was weak and it was not going to be much of a challenge. So she thought at first.

_Just beyond the Citadel:_

She _hurt._ She was burned, horrendously so, along parts of her body. From her neck to her hips and across her shoulders and her forearms were great charred streaks, her top was burned to a point that it was tattered and barely holding together in different areas, her jeans burned unevenly, tattered beyond anywhere she would wear them. She _hurt_ and she whimpered, a keening sound that was unusual to her to a point that she didn't understand what it was, at first, when she made it. Pain. Pain not of her own making, pain she did not at some level control purely to try to end things. 

It was unusual and part of her felt a giddy headiness at the realization that what she'd seen in those Timeless Halls was true. She was not alone, nor the mightiest, nor the greatest. She could be hurt, she had limits. She giggled for a moment, a laugh worthy of her sister Del and then she felt tears flowing down her eyes as the thought of so many of her sisters parading around and dancing and singing crossed her mind.

She remained in the crater, willing her power to heal herself, and then it occurred to her. There was a strangeness in this world. The air was wrong (though she did not need to breathe and the sounds she made were not as mortal sounds requiring a physical breath to speak them, for where she 'breathed' it was part of her function). It was thick and it was stagnant. The gravity was wrong, too. It was Earth-like but this was not the third planet around Sol. There was zero reason for a world like this, of endless ivory and gold and yet, somehow, areas where things that fit the niche of trees without fully resembling them and seeming to have agonized faces locked in a perpetual silent scream woven into the 'bark' (she rolled her eyes, whatever was here was trying way too hard to be edgy) grew straight from metal.

She _hurt_ but it was not as bad when her ankh, the one with the black streak across it, the one from her _first_ reality gleamed brightly and her power flowed through her, soothing her. There was something _wrong_ about this place. A half-emptiness, a sense of something that lived and was within the place and what was more, _was_ it. She had encountered entities like this before. She had taken them (the memory of the incomprehension of Tartarus, along with other such entities that even they were not truly eternal ached, but that was her nature and her being. She ended things, and she gave them new choices without making them for them).

She raised herself to her knees, the sheer agony influencing her in a way that she was not familiar with. This was not a good place, whatever this was.

She looked around her. Gold. Gold, everywhere. Very Midoan (she remembered how afraid he was to take her hand and the sorrows with which he wept when he did). Ivory, too. Bone.

She raised herself to her feet, or tried to, and screamed, truly _screamed_ when she could not stand unaided.

She looked at her hands and sighed.

This would not do, not as it was.

She let her skin darken, taking on one of her other shapes and her other forms. Her bushy hair became a great wide region of locs, her skin a dark brown and a glamour concealing the burns. A very dark brown, matching one of the most beautiful women she'd ever seen, a tall and dignified Sudanese woman. It was her tribute to a mortal who'd touched her heart and had been her first of many paramours, in her _second_ universe.

Around her body she formed armor, a formal kind of jacket and armor sliding to replace the torn fabric, her top-hat reappearing on her head, a silver cane forming and flowing down, adorned with a nob of titanium.

This was one of her faces, one seen as a man though she did not see herself as such, she was beyond gender at one sense and yet she was decidedly feminine at another. The Endless were always complicated like this.

In the armor and the nature of Samedi, who was so much of what she otherwise repressed, she stood proud, the cane permitting her to hide the weakness in her limbs.

The Citadel loomed beyond her and she knew she was being _watched._ Eyes, massive eyes, cold and terrible as the rays of dawn over the southern edges of the Earth,

She, an Endless, one of the most powerful Seven entities in all Existence, was being _watched_ in a world that felt....incomplete.

The shivers that ran down her body were from more than the anemic weakness of blood loss and from other things that seemed to whisper and to snarl at her in this shadowless hellscape.

Loneliness pervaded her and a great aching sense of something that she instinctively knew she dared not speak.

Carefully, with trembles of pain that her veil of dignity could not disguise, she gritted her teeth and with her cane she began to walk, moving away from the citadel and seeking to cross into the skies to try to find another place, a better one.

_The Gilded Throne:_

The entity on the throne drew her eyes to a woman in a formal tuxedo and trousers and a top hat walking up into the stars of her universes. 

Her eyes narrowed. It had survived, whatever it was.

Then they narrowed more deeply and the light of dead stars focused much more sharply on her target and with her target.

It had survived, and it was Anathema to her deathless paradise.

 **Well well,** she spoke.

Death walked into skies that suddenly _spoke_ and then a sensation as if both a wind and the grasp of an enormous hand reached for her and _squeezed_ and she screamed again, that sound still a novelty for reasons not of her own making, and she fell once more, hurled to the ground, in a fashion akin to Hephaestus and Prometheus. 


	3. Man of Lawlessness, Son of Perdition:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Death begins to grasp something of where she is. 
> 
> The God on the Gilded Throne begins to try to grasp the force which has fallen into her domain.

_Outskirts of the Citadel of Temple Azarath:_

Headlong, she fell, grasped in the immense force of something not of her making and wielding tremendous power. Eyes were watching her, immense and focused, gazing with the light of dead stars. Eyes watched her and a great hand grasped her as if she were a doll and it the hand of a child who was flinging her with delight, wishing her to break and to be broken. Her wings erupted out of her back, long and dark and coated with endless gleaming golden eyes, stars within infinite blackness of the hue of her hair and her eyes. She sought to call upon their strength. 

_I will not fall,_ she vowed to herself. So many and many a time had she sought to fall within her own worlds and her own function. To end herself and her Endless nature, that she could rest and to go a family who grew the more distant from her with each turn of the cycle of history and its vicious ironies.

 _I will not fall,_ she vowed. The hand hurled her more strongly and sharply, yet she was no mere child, even if often she met her sense of ageless weariness with a defiant appearance of youth. So much of her life was ugliness and raw choices, so she sought to provide beauty where its writ was limited. She was no child, she was a being....she focused herself and her nature on that of the hand that grasped her. She was vingtillions of years old, and with her brother in that first aeon had been part of the wards set on an ancient rebel who had laid siege to the gates of Heaven and had like her, fallen. This was a place where power was rooted in age. The older the being, the greater the power. That perception struck her then, as she closed her eyes and crossed her arms in front of her the way her worshipers had done in her time as Nephtys. She closed her eyes, willing herself to _be_ and then the grasp was broken and instead of falling she was hovering in the air, well above even the vast dome of this place.

Her wings fluttered, and she permitted herself the luxury of a smile, leaning down to place her forehead on the cane in her hands. For a time she hovered and the eyes that had watched her seemed to withdraw.

_The Gilded Throne:_

The Azar, the Undying Flame, saw a new avatar of hers take shape. Mortals, in this case, in a distant world. One of many who had grasped the secret of travel at speeds beyond what certain models of physics allowed. They had taken but the earliest steps into probing the infinity of space and had to grasp its most fundamental rule. All of existence was the mad dream of a deity that gnawed itself in its confusion, a blind idiot with countless mouths of circular dimensions full of infinitely sharp teeth. Existence was not truth, it was a set of lies upon lies, and in the madness of that understanding she was one of the greatest who understood this. In unreality, it was nothing to slake her hunger and extend her own desires for her own demise and to test worlds. Very few of them withstood things. None yet lived who would, until a being of golden sunfire eyes and hair as dark and skin as pale as that which hovered beyond her citadel would be. 

And yet.....that similarity drew her eye to the entity for a moment and then it flickered away.

Her power surged out as the avatar took shape and rose from the summoning circle, towering over the eight-limbed creatures that believed they had summoned her, their radial symmetry reflected around six eyes and three mouths. 

To them she was a towering and monstrous armored thing, the result of a conjuration indulged for silliness and lack of belief that it would, or that it could, work. A thing of bilateral, not radial symmetry, with twin eyes that glowed like dead stars and a single mouth that grinned with sharp fangs too long and too deep to fit into the kind of mouth that held them.

The summoning circle was a surprisingly strong one and would have held even arch-daemons of Pandaemonium, though not any of the Tetrarchs had such a being chosen to heed it.

For a daughter of Sepharad and Urhalzan it was the simplest thing in the world to take her first step from it, raising her arms to her side, drawing her head back, and then the echoing antisound of her call of slaughter and carnage boomed. It was a paradox of her being and her nature that she relished. She was of the Deathless, that category of being that had eradicated the concept of death itself where the writ of the Kelzhandar Oath lurked. And even in her great entity-empire did it lurk, though she took things much further than any others of her kin.

And yet more than most she relished these moments, where they saw the giant moving with a seeming slowness to match her size and then she let herself drop that pretense. The scent of blood and carnage filled her nostrils and she closed her eyes as she felt her presence extending through a world that became her bridgehead within seconds, gauntlets dripping with blood.

Her eyes flickered as she saw two of her galaxies that had been impending to collide for some billions of years before her grasp reached them begin to brush each other. A ghastly grin crossed her face as she willed the portions of her being from greatest to smallest to put their full measure into it. Two unstoppable forces and two immovable objects, each alike fixed in time, in place. In focus. Stars collided with stars, their heliospheres brushing against each other, push-pull-pull-push, a collision one had to live to experience. A low throaty breath echoed, a trace of the half-human being of woman born that lingered, a last hint of something that had once been in a sense but would never truly be.

In another universe she turned her gaze to a version of her homeworld, one of many Earths that had fallen into her embrace. In this world and in this time she had reached forward in time, for what could do whatever it wished, know whatever it needed to know, and be anywhere it wished to be had no obstacle of past-present-future. This had been a world locked in the carnage of a mutual slaughter, the end of kings and kingdoms not seeing peace but a bloodbath that had replaced it. Among these empires was one that had slaughtered that which was half her heritage on her mother's side and she had arisen near one of the slaughter-pens with eyes gleaming like dead stars.

The heartland of the sickness was depopulated and she was seen as the angel of Adonai himself, descended from Heaven and wielding armor as if from a Duerer engraving.

And then her gaze had turned from there to the wider world and the guns had fallen silent, death's sphere removed, and those who lived brought to eternal youth and to an ageless power and prowess where they sought invariably to escape her gaze when it was elsewhere. She knew of this, of course, and her gaze remained all the same and the delicious spirals of her own madness reified in the image of beings that were themselves and yet her likewise made it a game, a sport worth the having. In this Earth there was one God and creator of all things, by Whose will all things were made. 

And it was she, that God, who looked down from Heaven and brought the oceans to rise and relished that those who could not drown were dragged into its abyss, joining others lost in the eternal suffering of the stygian oceanic depths. Others were brought by fire into the heart and blood of Earth, to burn with a fire that would ne'er be quenched. Thunder and lightning in areas that had never seen rain and a downpour of blood and ash in those places. Individual mortals looked to the Heaven and she felt the parts of them that were allowed to remain aware of what had been done to them raise their gaze to turn and curse her and she grinned, and they quailed, sensing a malicious pleasure whispering through the wind.

Thunder fell and the bolts struck them and they burned and burned and burned. Another rasping sigh of pleasure as her gauntlets clenched and her nostrils flared, and her eyes closed.

_Outskirts of the Citadel of the Temple Azarath:_

Death willed reality to _part_ around her, raising her right hand and casting runes into the air. One by one they formed, gleaming kaleidoscopic hues, a mandala of sorts taking shape and sparking in the air. The eyes were withdrawn, and the sickness in this place had changed, and there was a chance now. No weight colliding against her. The mandala grew the more brilliant and from it sparked a circular rippling pool of light, and Death could not resist a quick breath of relief. 

Now, even with her wings visible. Now. She moved and slipped through the portal.

_The Gilded Throne:_

From colliding galaxies and tormenting countless quintillions of individual mortals the God's gaze turned to that which sought to flee her realm. There was power here, Anathema in nature to what she was and what she was meant to be. Those lips that had parted in rapt joy frowned and pulled tight in a narrow expression, hellfire-eyes narrowing and the light flickering out almost in rays from that narrowness. 

_Over an intedeterminate world:_

Something reached out to grasp her in this portal as Death found herself feeling a hint of freedom away from this strange and unhallowed place. It rose before her, towering over her, a colossus armored in dark green with dead-star eyes and a leering smile. 

She was not afraid, not then, having no idea of what it was that she saw or loomed over her, leaning forward.

Her cane lashed out and she hauled and struck the beast a sharp blow across the lower jaw and part of the face, giving a sharp smile when the blow drew blood that poured in an iridescent fashion down that cheek, the creature moving a gauntlet to the blow and making a strange sound in shock.

It turned to her and two voices spoke.

One low and sultry, a voice of old Sepharad, so old that it had not yet begun to speak Spanish and still spoke a Vulgar Latin, guttural Hebrew accenting the Latin syllables. The other was a storming booming voice, a Goddess's sneer that rippled with a terrifying power that surprised even her with its nature.

_**You are mighty. You strike me in my own realm and have a power that, I think, you believe will let you leave it.** _

Death had faced great beings before. The Lords of Apokolips and New Genesis, various angels of the Silver City. There were those who had tried not merely to resist her function but to kill her and they had never hurt her but her function had come for them in the end all the same when it was time. And here, as the creature loomed back up and its-no, her, right hand began to spark with Unlight Death sought to will her sphere to aid her, in its local shape here only to stare blankly.

**_Kelzhandar and its oath say that never shall death rear its head as the morning dew, here in the morning and gone in the evening. We endure for all time, and nothing, no creature, no concept masquerading poorly as a person shall threaten us!_ **

She did not see the backhand, merely feeling it, and again she fell, through the vacuum of space, into the cold light of a stellar nebula. Here, in a world without death, stars that had reached the endpoint of their cycle would endure for all time. Never would stars become iron. Cold light, one that caressed her in the manner that a few of the lovers she'd taken did. Her head rang, her hearing a screaming howl and she felt _something_ seeking to worm its way into her, ivory and gold and Hungry, thirsting for her very _soul._

Dark eyes flashed and she _willed_ resistance, pulling from her cheek something that snarled and roared in a muted fashion in the emptiness of the void with a dinosaurian face. 

She _willed_ again and black energy surged outward and the form shrieked soundlessly, dissipating into a cloud of dust that fell away from her as if it was afraid.

She drew herself to her feet.

Then she looked around her, and each of the stars that gazed at her gazed with the hue and the nature of the creature's eyes. Only there, in the infinity of space, ringed by the infinite stars, did she begin to grasp what kind of place she'd found herself within.

_**I.....am getting the Hell out of here.** _

No rune, this time. Merely ripping open a portal damage to Existence be damned, her wings at her side, calling upon the power of her shape as Samedi. In a blur of darkness she moved as a spear of shadow into the portal.

_The Gilded Throne:_

Now the Goddess looked again and her smile shifted. 

Mighty indeed.

_In the space between spaces:_

She had expected the thing to barrel at her in that armored form like a very tall woman with a sagittal crest crowning her head, but that was not what roared in an inhuman dual-voice, a sonorous foghorn bellow that led Death to groan in pain, a feeling of novelty that left her again frozen for a moment in confusion. That was all the armored being rushing at her needed. She saw two heads, one physical, one a spiritual and an intangible thing. Dinosaurian, skin darker green than the armor, eyes shining golden stars She braced herself, and then a sharp _crack._

_Before the Gilded Throne:  
_

She awoke, head ringing more firmly, her arms grasped by two figures. They seemed like her, like they had been human once and reworked and reshaped down to the very marrow of their bones. The man on the right was bald, completely so, and had a long flowing platinum-blonde beard, his skin a very pale, almost corpse-like, pink. On the left the man had skin dark as night and eyes that gleamed like hellfire, fanged teeth in his jaws. 

**_Coman, Juris,take the creature to the House of Knowledge. I shall send an avatar there soon._ **

The creature leaned forward.

**_Make sure she learns her place here and I shall reward you with a dream of true bliss, for a change._ **

The men, whom she saw now were clad in monastic seeming robes with rope-belts, bowed forward and spoke in a guttural pair of dialects of no nature of similarity to each other. 

She sought to resist, but all she could do was drag long lines into the floor of the place and then her own blood, more silvery-hued than that which had erupted from the beast's cheek, but still iridescent in its own right was dragged along it.

She did not see the ways the monks' eyes flickered to that, the anticipation, or the ways their bodies shifted subtly but slowly. Ever did Azarath taunt her victims with the legacy of hope, last of all demons of Pandora's box.

Only this time, perhaps, in the presence of a strange entity there was more. The streak of blood trailed, Death groaning in pain and shame, as they came to a great door. The bald monk reached out and caressed a pad, and then the door opened. They took Death within the room and left her tied to a chair, barbed-wire chains reaching around her chest just below the neck, around her wrists, and around her feet.

 ** _The adornments of our God,_ **the monks bowed.

And then they stalked out for a time, leaving her.

She waited, uncertain of how much time passed, frustrated as she sought to call upon her power and her skills and finding that all she could do was summon and conjure her cane and nothing more.

Then the metal before her bubbled and rose and the monster that had been on the throne formed from it, metal become flesh, dead-starlight eyes replaced by stars that were a brilliant blue in hue.

_**Twice you have sought to escape me, and once you have overcome my very nature, even in a tiny and infinitesimal part. You remind me of one who is not yet, has always been, and always shall have been.** _

The creature standing before her replaced armor with a blood-hued sari, her feet still clad in dark green boots as she reclined against a table, arms of stout shape curled in front of a chest neither buxom nor flat (and the monster quite preferred it that way. She commanded stars, the aesthetics of a mortal shape were less than nothing). The sari rustled and her muscles rasped the air by motion, her body shifting in small ways as the creature's dish-like flared cheeks saw smaller eyes manifest into existence like rippling pools of light, flickering with a blink.

**_You are not of my kin nor of my kind. I know all things in Heaven and in Hell, on worlds and under them and through them. There is a part of me that knows who you are and what you are, and yet I do not._ **

The two voices were dissonant and jarring, the louder voice belligerent in its hostility, as if the speaker wished to go to her and physically rend her. The softer one was curious, genuinely so, with a malicious sense of humor interwoven in its speech.

**_I don't like ignorance, even this partial game that I set for myself._ **

A hand that was smaller than the true height caressed her face. It burned to her touch and she found herself making a sound she had not since she was in the house of Time and Night and cast from it. Pain, as if her flesh, insofar as she had it, _burned._

The creature leaned in closer and the blue-starlight flickered against her skin and there was more _burning_ and she began to focus her power into her cane, seeking a way out of this place. 

**_No, creature, that is not within you power._ **

The hand was joined by another, beneath her chin, and the seven eyes that met her gleamed as seven candles.

_**To begin, I am Zezhelanzunui, the Undying Flame. Firstborn of Chaos, Eldest and Fatherless, the Great Devourer, Soulflayer, the God on the Gilded Throne.** _

_**These are names by which I am known, a small number of them. Mine a gaze that flays souls and sows their wounds with salt and flays them, mind you, with a dull knife, the better to draw pain and to savor the draught of the sensations up and down their flesh.** _

_**I am of the Deathless, those sworn by heritage and descent to the Kelzhandar Oath. Mine is a sphere that knows nothing of Death, and all else is known to me.** _

_**And yet, here, gazing upon you, there is partial ignorance.** _

Her flesh was singing black and she whimpered again, as the creature leaned in and the heat of its furnace was next to her.   


_**So tell me, little creature, am I to be beholden to my oath? Is it a Death and of that kind that has fallen within my sphere, for the first time in aeons?** _


	4. Through the Eyes of the Goddess:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The God of the Gilded Throne begins to apply the full weight of her power to interrogate her captive. 
> 
> Death seeks to escape.

_Interrogation Room:_

Her flesh singed and there were spreading elements of carbonized marks in the shape of what was and wasn't handprints on her face. There were eyes like burning spheres of blue stars that blazed against her, narrowing and casting rays of light against her face. 

Then the hands moved away and the creature that stood in front of her face seemed to straighten out a crease in her sari.

 _ **How curious,**_ the twin voices rippled. The softer one having a shade of malice to it that inflected her voice less with sing-song and more with a hiss, the booming one with an edge of sharp amusement.

**_There are only a few entities that could be blind spots to one of my nature. One of my own kind, of a greater or at least different weight in Existence to myself. Or something reliant on that power of Death and of Ending, I know you're not of the Oath, creature. My kind have specific reverberations in impact. In a quantum existence, we are Singular, for around us reality is anchored as it was in the old days to those of Xoth and the fell gods that empire worshiped. You? You are quantum, and singular for a time because what has kept you in your usual state of being does not exist._ **

The right hand tapped on the beast's lower jaw. 

_**So that leaves really only one prospect.** _

Sunfire eyes burning into her flesh again. 

**_Death come among the Deathless._ **

Both voices laughed, their laughter at a jarring dissonance and her ears and her very being seemed to sting with the sound.

Then the creature lanced out to grasp her ankh and Death found herself struggling then.

_**But this, now? This is a symbol of life, one used by the stunted children of Khemet, obsessed with the reality of death and the grave. Of corpses they knew much, of the living beings who became them they never cared to know anything at all.** _

For one of the few times in her life, in her full form, Death felt a sharp pain and a sense of metaphysical violation when the ankh was ripped off of her neck, held in the paw of the beast that looked at her.

_**Strange, this. It looks silver, minus this single streak of darkness. That's no tarnish.** _

The creature's right pointer finger was tapping and Death trembled, slightly disoriented, her vision spinning.

_**Interesting indeed. So absent this, you either lose some of your power, or have it taken from you. And no doubt wonder how something can hold the sigil of the grave and yet be exempt from its call.** _

The beast placed her sigil in its sash that wove its way around her sari, dark green boots echoing like drums as it stalked around her, seeing Death's fidgeting and the ways her motions differed.

**_And yet even here the weight of my being cannot crush you entirely._ **

The burning hand was at the edge of her neck, just beneath her hair, dual voices hissing into her ear.

_**There is nothing of flesh about you as there is of me, and of all my kin. You are humanoid because I am.** _

Fingers in the primate fashion, with flesh, though flesh of diamond strength, became reptilian with sharp long claws that dug into her neck, trickles of blood extending from the grip. Two heads, one for each voice, and a creature of hulking shape and dimension that removed her hands and strode around, and she stared at a being of hue as green as she was, clad in all-black clothing, dark eyes meeting her own.

_**Do you even exist, creature? Or do you merely mirror what is shown to you?** _

Both voices were genuinely curious, and the being's claws scraped along the table with a painful sound. Silverish iridescent blood trickled down the chair as Death fought harder to escape the barbed wire binding her to it.

 _ **Go to Hell,**_ she rasped.

 _ **Ah, it speaks!**_ Both voices mocked, and then the right hand raised itself as energy drew around the claws and seemed to pulse and thread through the veins.

The energy lanced out and struck into her wounds and she groaned in disgust to see her blood seemingly _drunk_ and that deeply, as if the energy were a vampire with its fangs fastened deep within her flesh.

The tendrils withdrew and the creature licked the blood and then, Death focused on a simple reality. Power here derived from age, and in this sense she was much older than whatever this....beast...was. She did not have her sphere, she had a part of her soul on the creature's sash, but she was not helpless. She would never be helpless, she vowed. Even here, even in the gaze of the thing she was slowly realizing was all parts of this universe and even the very chair she sat on, she would not let herself yield to this any longer than she had.

Her willpower blazed out of her with flames of darkest night and the chains that held her corroded into rust and then clouds of golden dust rose. Her arms and her legs hurt but that didn't matter as the two-headed draconic creature stared at her with simple bemusement. She walked with limps and twitches of pain on her lips, before moving with a speed that the monster did not realize she possessed to re-grasp her ankh, letting out a simple sigh of relief at the power that surged back in and through and within her as her wings, deep obsidian hue with ten thousand gleaming golden eyes, burst into being. Her cane, which had fallen when she had yanked herself out of the chair held her up now more in truth than in symbolism, and then she willed herself not to fall, hoping that it would not happen as she carved two runes on the floor and a portal opened.

Flipping the bird to her captor without turning, she threw herself down it once more.

This time she did not will herself to leave this place, not immediately. She just wanted to get away from this Citadel and the monster at its heart.

_Planetoid, System Netelashazrun, Azarath:_

Her portal opened not over the skies, this time, but on a planetoid that was uninhabited and uninhabitable. She had not hoped for escape, at the one hand, but she had hoped to get further out and away than she did. Raising herself from the portal, she let herself slump against a rock, her wrists stinging and her ankles likewise. It was sharp stings, too, like a particularly nasty bite from a particularly nasty subset of ant. Her right wrist , the one where the vampiric wound was dealt, stung more sharply, as she reclined against the rock and sagged, exhausted. Her arms hurt, she hurt, and her sigil gleamed with light as she began to focus her full power onto healing herself. 

The exhaustion was sharp, as she realized she would have to focus no small amount of her power against something that was more like a virus than not (even if the full implications of this had not occurred to her yet, and would not). Exhaustion pulled at her with a greater strength than that which had left the burns that were fading and torn into her wrists and her ankles, and she yielded to it with a non-verbal keening sound, slumping further against the rock as her eyes closed.

_The Dreaming, Palace of Dream of the Endless:_

In the dream she was not hurt and exhausted, held within the terrible eyes of something more nearly virus than individual. 

She was not alone and full of sorrows. Instead, she saw her brother, and her brother as he had been before she had taken him in that first uni-

Her eyes widened and then narrowed, widening again.

 **Sister,** he said, and his arms reached out for her and she let herself fly to them and held him fiercely.

It was not merely the many Dreams that she had known who held her here, but her very _first_ brother, the one she thought of, at so many levels, as her real one.

**Sister, your wounds are infected, even with your full power.**

She nodded. 

_**I....I know, lil' bro.**_ Her voice was higher pitched than usual, weak.

Dream did not smile, tall and thin and bushy-haired as he was, but he moved back and raised sand in his right hand, from his pouch.

 **I am but a dream, sister,** and he smiled, with a wry grin, his sense of humor fully there. **Yet here, at last, I have found you and for even so short a time, I shall do what I can to help.**

The Sandman raised his right hand and blew his sands toward her in her dream and she felt a strong wind blowing. 

_Netelaszhrun, Azarath:_

Death of the Endless lay slumped against a rock, and yet if any had seen her there or sought to see her, they would have seen a spectral figure who was much taller than she was in clothes as dark as her own kneeling beside her, working incantations that bound the wounds in her wrists and her ankles, purging them of an infection that slithered out in a form like that of a snake, slithered out and yet next to the semi-conscious and uncontrolled might of Death withered into smoke that blew away with the shrieks of the damned. 

They would have also seen the spectre gently place his hand on his sleeping sister's forehead, a soft sad smile of loss and understanding there. Yet as he worked, the wounds healed and strength flowed into her, and her twitching stilled, as she became calmer.

_Citadel of the Temple Azarath:_

The monster that stood against the table gnawed at one of her claws, her fangs grinding against it with an eerie howl. 

The creature had been so close to revealing how a thing of Death came to be in her realm, and what it was that another such had appeared. And why, of all forms, it was so deliciously beautiful a woman, at that.

She mused, her eyes crossing across the infinity of her dimensions (and stars writhing in their agonies and galaxies roiling with howling shrieking bedlam in her eyes.

She cast her gaze further out from the universe where her citadel was and then her eyes narrowed. Four universes over, on a planetoid. A stunted and weak thing. A blockage on her sight.

_**You cannot hide from me, little Death. I shall find you, and then even Death shall wish to die, and never shall that wish be granted to you.** _

So she vowed, then, still gnawing on her claw. 

Then her eyes, on both heads, narrowed.

She had had this thing in her power, had it fully, in an interrogation room. Her chains were working their transformational power upon the creature and it had escaped her, in plain sight.

Clearly, though it looked like more of a girl than a woman, it was not one.

Her mind flickered in and out of lucidity for a time, as Death healed and found herself lost more deeply in the presence of Dream and Dreaming and having one of her own wishes fulfilled.

The Azar blinked, after a time-lapse, as a pulse of emotion surged from the blank spot in her otherwise-unconstricted vsiion. Loneliness, desperation for acceptance.

The Azar smiled, then.

Ah, Inhuman may that beast be, without traces of blood or indeed of internal organs save as she wished, blank in the vision that she was accustomed to having unconstricted, but here, finally, was something that would be wielded at a much sharper level.

In less than the blinking of an eye, the Azar returned to the Gilded Throne.

Beyond the planetoid a sickly brownish green light formed, as a giant clad in dark green armor with a crudely designed stylized two-headed dragon materialized over the world where Death was slumped against the rock, and waited, her arms folded across her chest.

Dead-starlight eyes blazed downward, and then the Azar descended from the skies with her cape billowing around her, the sound of the impact awakening Death, whose eyes suddenly widened.

For the first time, the Azar saw Death not merely annoyed but truly _angry_ and relished that anger with a smug smile as she saw Death moving her cane to form more runes and flee. The Azar held out her right hand and metal began to flow out of thin air, long streams of metal consolidating into a great warhammer, one that gleamed with the dead-starlight energy.

The Azar smiled as Death worked at a swift pace to finish the next set of runes, hoisting the hammer high over her head, and then with a crocodilian grin slammed the hammer down onto the ground, a pulse of energy shattering the runes before they could form and hurling Death ass over teakettle from the backlash. Her wings flared out and she found herself levitating in the air, her cane held before her.

The Azar smiled again.

_**You did not and do not understand, creature. My kind are hostile to the very concept of death and in this as in few other things I am of the children of Kelzhandar and of the great oath sworn there.** _

She held the hammer out, the head extending well away from her body as it was several times longer than a full grown man was tall.

_**We, children of Urhalzan, and of the Unity, swore that never should Death cross into our realms. The Lord of the Grave, the master of the Staff of Storms sought to wield that power against us. So did a few others of the Witch-Kings. Father overcame them all and it did not end well for them.** _

The avatar spat on the ground.

_**And now that I know the nature of that power that lurks within you, I get to remember a part of my heritage often lost in the mastery of this six thousand universes.** _

The crocodile grin intensified as her skin took on a greenish tone. 

**_I am a daughter of Turugamvirakil, Master of Urhalzan, who built the deathless empire on the Field of Corpses. Whatever else I am, I will always be this, and you, thing of Death, are in a place that is no friend to you. You are not of my kind, nor are you of Pandaemonium, nor of the Other Gods, those things of ancient times._ **

The hammer vanished, but power drew in gauntlets that seemed to shift and to become less greenish armor and more reptilian flesh, adorned with scales and claws that took a golden sheen, power drawing around them. 

Then a spear of light shot from two of the claws on each hand and struck clean through Death, who writhed in the strike from something not fire nor sorcery but akin to both.

**_The Endless. Seven concepts, of which you are the second. Hurm._ **

Then the monster began to speak an old tongue, though to Death of the Endless it was a new one, and runes began to form around her, carved in an alien script with angles that did not match the power of the Endless, nor of any species known to her world. The light carried with a dissonant and eerie droning sound that thickened the air, and she found that her wings felt heavier and so did she.

When she prepared to speak a Word of Power of her own her jaw clenched shut, and then she saw a vision.

_A gigantic creature, tall and hulking even by the standard of other Dinosaurian entities like him strode in full armor, where others wore a mixture of leather jerkins and modified deels. Nine glowing suns where once had been eyes of deep reddish-brown gazed out at the entire population of this part of Urhalzan. A messenger of his had been attacked and his soul bound, for a time, within the Staff of Storms until he had freed him. Now he strode at this entire region, one and a half million creatures. A few of them were clad in more opulent clothing that had seen better days. Others had broken teeth and the signs of stunting from the hard work that sustained life, from the ignorance of so many things._

_Turumgavirakil's lip curled._

**_You have endorsed and drawn to yourself the viper of Death and of the power of the Grave. You love that power so well? Go to it!_ **

_The creature raised his right hand and then power was summoned from him and from the four hundred and ninety-nine beings by his side. In a blinding flash of light a power was unleashed and one and a quarter million bodies burned, a sacrifice by fire, as the gigantic creature drew back his arms and raised his head and bellowed the name of the fearsome Sky-God that had drawn him into that conquest._

_it was the last words that held her entranced as the power grew and her own seemed to fade for a time._

**_Death dies here. By the field of Blood shall my triumph, and that of my family over all that is, or will ever be, be sealed._ **

The Azar knelt beside her, the Avatar's oversized gauntlet seeming to breathe in a viscerally organic fashion. Gauntlets again, the claws shrinking back into the metal, she caressed Death's cheek, as the dead-star gaze became bright blue light. 

The avatar turned as the Goddess of the Gilded Throne herself materialized beside her and dissipated her with a wave of her hand.

The interrogation and the wounds had done their work. Now she knew enough of what this being was to begin to work her will.

Kneeling in the same position as the Avatar had, claws brushed against Death's body as the runes blazed with the power of the enchantments at work.

 _ **Perhaps Father would be proud of me for this. Nothing else that would make him so,**_ and then the blade crunched into what was and wasn't a skull as the Goddess of the Gilded Throne's power surged in and she sought to explore within the vast webs of memory and of all else that was and was not with Death of the ENdless. 


	5. All Our Yesterdays:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Azar explores the past of Death of the Endless.

_Planetoid Nehelanzsharun:_

The Goddess of the Gilded Throne knelt beside her captive at one level. She knelt with claws that dug deep into her face, an arm that had been within bloated armor now one of strong, sharp musculature and greenish scales. A bare arm. The kind that would have seen her father the Deathbane call her a primitive blundering savage who disrespected the mores of civilization. She did not care. She could kneel by the side of an unconscious _thing_ on a rock larger than an asteroid but not quite enough to be a dwarf planet indefinitely, for this desolate place was as much her as the atoms within it, or the sprawling Galaxy of which it was among the most minor of minor things. In her own realm, nothing could harm her, indefinitely. And as yet nothing existed that truly could. 

For but a second she saw a vision of the future, of a being clad in shale grey armor with a black.....

A part of her wished to take that ankh and annihilate it and the creature here and yet she had a feeling that it would not prove so simple as all that, and curiosity demanded slaking.

_The Timestream:  
_

Now this was curious. These were memories, so to speak, but here within the memories....

 ** _Get out of my head!_** A voice thundered, and she turned. There stood the being she was looking at beneath her, clad in black shoes, black jeans with a belt that was adorned by silver skulls. A tank top that exposed part of her midriff, a silver ankh, and hair as bushy as that of the woman who'd been before her. Her black eyes flashed with anger.

_**Get out!** _

Blasts of energy dark as night, that hovered within edges of her perception and yet was if not invisible much of the way to being so slammed into her. The Azar roared in anger, both voices howling in fury. She was hurled back, in the infinite darkness and fog of the Timestream, blood fountaining from a wound at her side.

The wound healed and the Azar cracked her neck.

**_So we're playing rough, then._ **

Zezhelanzunui smiled as her clawed hands splayed outward and then in a sudden wrenching sensation she found herself in a place that she did not expect.

_Apartment of Death of the Endless, near the Sunless Lands:_

It was a strange thing. She was a hulking figure in her normal height, the one she was in here. If this were a true apartment her mere motions would have exploded the place beyond repair. Instead she seemed to fit comfortably as if it were normal, and she looked around with a visible sneer of disgust. A mess. Stockings, some long strips of fabric, others fishnets, cast around. A teddy bear on the sofa, which was a nasty greenish hue the color of dried vomit (in the Azar's jaundiced opinion) and a fishbowl with goldfish. A straw-colored eyebrow rose, followed by a few more, as she looked at them.

There were bookshelves and she strode with a lumbering tread that did not echo as it did elsewhere, and went to it. A large collection, larger than the space could have held on its own. And the middle shelves were firmly occupied by something very strange. A series. _The Sandman,_ in multiple volumes, and one that said simply _Death._

There were other volumes, too, ones that she could see and yet not see. 

Strange. She was here, in the memories, and yet the creature that had assaulted her was-

An impact struck her chin and hurled her clean from the apartment, the knob of a cane bedecked in strong silver colliding with her with an impact to flatten mountains. Reality _twisted_ around her, and she snarled. Trying to drag the creature into letting her into her head did not work.

She _pulled_ and then smiled much more coldly.

_Domdaniel, Spain:_

A citadel she remembered mostly in partial glimpses of old wrongful assumptions and in the cruel games played, this. Weak and austere by comparison to what had succeeded it yet there were elements of gilding worked into and around the framework. And the throne, from which the past had played its game and collided with the future to become the present. 

Death of the Endless was on her knees beside her, a haggard look in her eyes, her head bleeding freely from two puncture wounds.

There was an air of amusement and anger with a silky thread of menace as she rasped with lips that barely moved, save to curl on the left to bare a few of her teeth:

_**I'm not something so easy to control as you could wish, abomination.** _

Zezhelanzunui sighed and then grasped her by the neck, hoisting her up, enjoying that Death let herself grow in size to a point that doing so merely lifted her off the ground as she was now equal in height.

_**This is not control, child. This is the business of the Kelzhandar Oath.** _

Death of the Endless snarled and then slammed her cane into the Azar's chin, Zezhelanzunui roaring as she let her go and the being grew her great wings again and sought to slam through the light at the edge of the cave that Domdaniel had been before she reshaped it. 

With a visible sneer the creature slammed her hands together and the vision that had been shifted.

_The Steppes of Kelzhandar, Urhalzan:_

Now Death fell once more, a streak of dirt and grass erupting from the path of her landing, as she groaned with pain that filled her body, in a starkly beautiful green grassland beneath a silver sky. The dirt that she'd landed in went up her nose and into her mouth and she spent time coughing and wheezing, shuddering. The feeling her was as Azarath ten thousandfold. 

Beside her squatted the monster that pursued her, now clad in a deel of the same hue as her armor, her bare clawed feet digging into the ground, her claws resting on her knees, fanged teeth bared in a vicious snarl.

**_Here is where the Oath was sworn, and enforced against the concept that you represent, Death of the Endless. Here will it be that Death dies, such that nothing can resurrect it._ **

For a moment her eyes turned and she saw a tall giant of skin the same color as Death of the Endless save that it gleamed with an unnatural light that did not obey the true properties of light, nine sunfires gleaming, blue-striped hair in a ponytail at her side as she called lightning-smoke at her fingertips. Familarity and wrath was kindled and that same sigil, though in black, gleamed on shale grey armor.

 _ **Nothing,**_ she rasped in a thick voice and then her right arm lanced out and grasped Death of the Endless, who had just cleared the ground from her face and hurled her to the ground, face-first. Unlight with the jagged edges akin to lightning bolts surged from her claws and the shriek of pain from Death was one that she gloried in, as was the renewed smell of her burning flesh.

**_In my dreams I see something that looks like you, that has the ankh as sigil. Her eyes are not night-dark but golden suns. Eyes of our kindred. Do you become one of father's whores on your mortal day, perhaps?_ **

Death froze. How could s-

_**Your mind was secret before I entered that apartment of yours. Now I know much more than I did. You are between iterations of your function, and...you want to end. Death wants to die.** _

Beneath a grey sky, claws digging into her and scorching her with Unlight, she writhed and then froze when the dual voices in a rare perfect harmony where each reinforced the other rasped into her ear:

_**Nothing dies in Azarath, little Death. Not even you. Of course since nothing can die, what good are you?** _

Death focused the fullness of her strength. If another sought to entrap her in the fullness of her mind and of her being.....very well, then. She would not listen to the jibes of a barbarian trying to pin her in a deathless realm.

She closed her eyes....

_Temple Azarath:_

Now this was new, blinked the Goddess of the Gilded Throne. New and yet....familiar. Memories of the future-past-present rippled around her, of the impact of her discovery, and of her working to insinuate herself into a cycle for her own amusement. 

This would be, and yet it had always been.

Exploring the place for the first time and among many times, she found herself pausing by a statue, tall and golden. A statue of herself, in a room lit by fires.

**_You wanted to be in my head and in my past. Now you are._ **

She whirled around and saw Death of the Endless, but now a grim and unsmiling and dour entity, though she could see from little twitches of her eyes that this Death was brittle. Brittle enough for a good solid kick to perhaps shatter beyond repair. But now _she_ wore armor of grey, though it was more painted than the unpainted metal minus the black ankh of the other figure. She was smaller, human-sized, puny against her twenty-five feet. The cape she wore was deep black, and it went halfway down her back, not all the way. And the eyes......the eyes were pools of darkness, not glowing Suns. Yet the resemblance was uncanny.

**_I fell in your world because I was wounded, in ignorance that such a place or that monsters like you existed. I would have preferred to remain so. I am not a victim, not of you, nor of anyone, and if you seek to destroy me you shall need much more than you are capable of creating.....Azar._ **

The God of the Gilded Throne smiled and then snapped her fingers.

For a moment a face leered at Death, skin red as blood and four gleaming eyes gazing at her as it licked its lips.

She froze then, the flashback entrapping her in that same freeze-cycle that happened whenever that memory struck.

_**If you think the Angra Mainyu made you know pain, little Endless, you know nothing of its meaning.** _

_**I see into that empty black thing you call a heart.** _

And then the creature smiled at her in an entirely different note, as metal flowed and she froze still moreso as the metal flowed not into a warhammer this time but into a great blade, adorned with fell runes, the works of a realm of entities dedicated to the destruction of worlds in volcanic fury.

**_And I have seen that which laid you low. Calls herself_ ** **_The Golden. Pfah._ **

The creature that strode to her was the dish-faced being, with six eyes of blue starlight burning, two in deep set sockets, others down her face in a semicircle that gleamed. The blade in her left hand erupted into a blazing Unlight that hungered and now she could hear the hiss:

_I-nishi-Azarath! Zezhelanzunui atshalavazshin!_

The two phrases echoed and re-echoed and she looked at her determined.

_**Mine the hands that heal,** _

_**Mine the hands that kill.** _

_**Mine the hands that stilled the lightning-flash,** _

_**Mine the hands that calm the wine-dark sea.** _

_**Mine is the House of Pain.** _

_**I am that which looked upon the world of ash....** _

_**and that which remade it into ivory and gold.** _

_**Mine the hands that eldest and fatherless made Chaos anew.** _

_**And mine the hands that by blade of fire shall remake Death anew.** _

Death snarled, then, a visceral and ugly sound.

_**Channel that memory, will you?** _

Her cane in her hands, she focused the fullness of her strength and a shield of utter darkness rose before her as the Undying Flame strode with a sword to end worlds toward the embodiment of life and death. Beneath the darkness she again cast runes, these more potent and powerful. For the first time, calling upon a magick greater than her own, of those fantastic Other gods that danced with tenebrous hands wielding cracked flutes and played monstrous drums to soothe the Great Dreamer, the creator of all that is or would ever be. Fire blazed then, brilliant and terrible, and brushed against her shield of darkness.

_**I am the Alpha and the Omega,** _

_**The Beginning and the End.** _

_**By me all things in Azarath are made.** _

_**In my hands all is shall live and never truly die,** _

_**it shall long for death for its greatest dreams are made real and made nightmarish.** _

_**From the Gilded Throne do I speak of great secrets and wisdom,** _

_**and with a blade of fire Death shall burn.** _

She could hear the air hiss around the blade as it was drawn up in a strike more suited for a butcher.

She finished the last of the runes behind her shield of darkness as the blade came down and her darkness hissed in pain and smoke rose thick and choking, and then smiled in triumph as her runes blazed with light that outweighed the immense sympathetic pain of having her shields broken and the feeling from one of her arms at a strange angle that her arm had been damaged much as the shield.

The monster that strode to her in triumph paused for a moment at the gleaming runes, then hissed.

 _ **That won't help you now,**_ then lunged for her and-

Death of the Endless awoke with an agonized scream, her head a sharp stab of pain, blood trickling down, her vision blurry. Runes gleamed before her, the runes that she had carved in a vision as the monster that towered over her moved to a point that she more than covered her with the immensity of her body.

**_Clever girl,but not clever enough._ **

The runes gleamed and Death formed the last word of an incantation, a name older than the eldest of the Gods, one of the two primordial forces, that which crawled beyond the stars and then light blazed out again and she smiled the kind of unkind smile she'd let herself know only a few times before as the light surged within her and for a moment she could feel her Sunless Lands again. The scorching, the rip in her skull, the injuries mental and physical and emotional and metaphysical that had accumulated were undone.

It was not a solution she could use indefinitely or frequently, and the invocation of this power would always carry a steep price for it, but for a time, she would be able to be as if she were herself again.

And with that knowledge she hurled her elbow back and the giant found herself hurled from her and she flew into the air, saluted her with the cane, and then formed a portal in a further bid to escape.

The monster snarled.

**_Still not enough for you to override my power in my own domain, Endless. I would think one such as you would understand that concept better._**

With a frustrated growl she _pulled_ and this time, when the portal re-opened, simply jumped inside it herself with a leap more like that of a feral simian than what she was, and a grin on her face worthy of the most sadistic mortals.

She had seen the past, and now, now that the beast was stronger, she would prove that Deathlessness would override Death and the shadow of nine eyes like golden suns would fade.


	6. The Flame of Gold and Ivory:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Death once more seeks to escape.

_The Gilded Throne, Citadel of the Temple Azarath:_

On the Gilded Throne the creature that looked saw with eyes that saw through countless universes. Each of them was an extension of its very being, of its very person. From the lowliest sub-atomic particles that were writhing in profound agonies, to the grander galaxies that knew each and every star was likewise her own being. She threw two stars at each other to savor the kind of pain and clawing at herself that she could do on more minor scales. Individual lives were traversed, affected, afflicted. They had been allowed a terrible autonomy to know that they were no longer of themselves but were innately at their very _souls_ become a unity with a divine mind and will beyond them all. Over ten thousand infinities, from their lowliest elements to their greatest, every single element within her as it was her. 

Everything.....save one. One that had defied her, which existed as a blank spot on senses that could not, should not, would not have any such concept. Her voices rasped then in a low and dangerous snarl as her willpower extended outward, and then the entity on the throne stepped from it, and her being merged with that which had just leaped into a portal. Twice she had seen the thing brought to her throne and still it had escaped. Avatars were not enough. A disorderly _thing_ jarred at the edges of her being and her power and her majesty. A discordant note in a perfect chorus, Chaos unhindered to reshape and sculpt as it would.

_The portal between Existence:_

Death had found herself empowered and strengthened back to the full nature of her being. Her wings were flapping furiously, moreso than they ever did. She was moving at a speed beyond anything she had known was within her to do. She had encountered something very dangerous, she had- 

A roar in two voices echoed in the place she was within, and she froze for a moment. Less than a picosecond but it was far too long. The twin-voiced bellow echoed in rolling wrath, and then a grip grasped her ankle in a vice that led her to scream in pain and to turn and look back. _It_ had followed her. This thing. An abomination of desolation. What grasped her was not a gauntlet, it was a hand, in a loose sense. Nine fingers, adorned with sharp claws. It had twelve limbs, each bristling with sharp claws akin to the others, great batlike wings likewise extended. Its face was draconic, eyes gleaming like dead stars. In this place within and without the walls of Existence the thing was a jagged tear in that element, a thing of Hunger and Domination, its very motions an assault to her being.

The grip on her ankle moved up with an appalling speed, the hand now grasping her neck, the claws digging in. Iridescent blood was drawn by it.

Two voices echoed, one low and silky, gloating with its capture.

The other like rushing waters, stern and vengeful wrathful beyond imagining.

**_You truly do bleed. Weak._ **

The grip on her neck intensified and then with a wrenching _motion_ the portal ripped open and she was brought down through the portal back into the being of the Empire-entity, whose core, that which was of woman-born, grasped her and hurled through the rift, into open space.

The being hovered within herself and drew on the full nature of that which she was. Deathless majesty, the entire element of over ten thousand universes drawn into being as one entity. Avatars were withdrawn from partial conquests, absorbed into the weight of that which let herself shrink to just over twice the physical appearance of Death.

Death's nose bled, for a moment, and then she formed her cane, wiping it, and the bleeding stopped, and that around her neck healed, the blood misting away.

She growled.

_**You have no power over me, daughter of Turugamvirakil.** _

The creature's eyes gleamed with starlight, sickly coronas extending from them, as she now seemed semi-human, clad in dark green armor with a bright blue cape that billowed in an unnatural wind. Six eyes of starlight gleamed from her face, sharp fangs gleaming with a bright light, mirroring that of her eyes. Her gauntlets clanged against each other with an eerie resonance that made Death wince. 

**_In this place, I have every power, Death of the Endless. There are things that I can learn, and that I have learned in that set of memories of yours._ **

The thing's bright fangs shone, and then she leaned forward, her voices near Death's left ear.

_**Among them was a magnificent word. A three-syllable thing. Fascinating, that. A True Name. Like that which permits me to grasp power over many things.** _

She waved her right hand and Death for a moment saw beings of ethereal light shackled within the soul, their light overridden and become foul,

_**What power in a name, O daughter of Time and Night, and what weakness.** _

Death's eyes glared. This would not be born.

_**You made one error, Undying Flame. You have shown me** _ **your _true name as well._**

The creature smiled. 

_**You seek to wield its power against me? Do so if you dare! In your world you might be a being who has oversight of a function across countless universes but here, you are nothing and I am everything. I am the starlight and the sub-atomic particles, the worlds and the creeping things. I told you my name because you cannot wield its power. Only a few beings can, and one of them is my** _ **father. _And whatever you are, Turugamvirakil the Deathless Emperor, Unifier of my homeworld, you are not. Nor shall you ever be._**

Death of the Endless smiled in turn, a cold and unkind smile, the old kind she used to have in the days of being hard and brittle and resentful of outliving worlds. 

_**I bind you, Zezhelanzunui of Azarath, Dinah of Israel, Minerva of Domdaniel, in thy name and in thy power.** _

The creature froze, its smugness gone.

_**I bind you that you shall do me no harm, and that you shall allow me to leave your fair domain. No motion shall you make that wills me harm.** _

Fetters seemed to rise around the creature, holding it at the wrist and the ankles.

The creature snarled.

_**You seek to wield a power against me, creature, that is beyond you.** _

Death of the Endless formed one of her floppy hats over her, tapping her chin.

_**Am I? You have not been able to control me even as you sought to dominate my will by showing me a terrible massacre your father committed, an offering to glut the maw of whatever entity is like me in your sphere before he sought to cut off its influence. You boast of power but you do not show it. For all that you claim to be my superior, here I am, undiminished, even making me bleed did not do what you wanted it to do.** _

_**I do not need the Sunless Lands to escape you when your own arrogance remains your greatest folly after your madness.** _

_**You are bound. You have lost everything, you have gained nothing. Good day, madmoiselle.** _

She tipped her hat and merrily began to form a rune again.

The creature held in its fetters at first struggled to undermine them, then smiled. Were the fetters to be what she had thought and her power what she believed, she should have been immobile. And yet she was moving within them.

She focused and then the dead stars began to live again, in a small manner, light burning at the edge of the shackles.

She snarled, a two-voiced rasp that grated on her. She hated having to admit even a partial weakness. Yet the shackles burned, and the grin intensified as she began to incant in the Old Tongue, the language of her people from the time of the Steppe, long before the dream of empire had become near truthful even on a merely planetary scale. The incantation echoed and the portal that Death was creating guttered and died in an explosion of light that hurled her through space. The creature smiled, then, and incanted again, the spell forming a vast plume of a substance neither fire nor plasma but akin to both. It fell on Death of the Endless with an overpowering surge of energy and the chains around her _snapped_ with a terrible crack.

Death's cane became her umbrella and the plume rolled off of her, though she was visibly breathing and shaking hard.

The monster smiled.

_**It took more out of you than you realized, when you withstood my power that first time. Even after all my best efforts. I broke your power over me by speaking my true name. Now I speak y-** _

Death's umbrella was a cane and she hurled it with surpassing speed, throwing it clean through the creature's throat as silver iridescent blood erupted out in a spray of such fluidity that the coldness of space made it seem a great jagged lightning bolt from the being's throat. 

_**You were saying?** _

The cane returned to her hand. 

Then she saw the entity smiling and the very fabric of existence began to speak the syllables as she began to form the rune with true fear.

The fear jogged her motions, causing her to miss two smaller gestures by narrow margins, and then she heard the syllables spoken in full and her body froze, the power over her absolute.

The frozen blood _shattered_ and the creature's throat healed. It snarled and the snarl was mirrored by reality.

**_I will not bind you, though I have spoken your name. You made me bleed. You cost me my voice in my own flesh, that born of Julia Domina. You tore my flesh through as only one shall do aside from you, Endless. One fated to ascend to Godhood. He earned it. You?_ **

The being that moved toward her was draconic, dinosaurian frill gleaming silver with the being's blood, a crown adorned by serrated horns. 

_**I will show you the nature that you consider yourself superior to, that which you sought to silence but could not. You sought to escape me, creature. You have been thwarted each time. Your power is sufficient to withstand things but not to actively work against it. You sought to tunnel out of Existence and I found you.** _

One of the clawed hands backhanded her into a world, the collision raising a crater. The thing that descended from the skies was only at her full height of twenty-five feet in truth but seemed for a moment to be a colossus that blotted out the stars, yet before she could rise to her feet the thing landed, its boot on her body, the full weight of its being not just in the size it had ascended to, but of the very metaphysical essence of its being magnifying the weight.

It spoke her true name again and her resistance froze and she seemed as a statue, then for a moment a surprisingly girly giggle echoed with a sadist's relish as the thing moved the foot to shrink itself to merely twice her size again and she was moved up in its clawed hand and then hurled in a metronomic fashion up and down, before being hurled into a mountain. Part of her formed a grim smile.

To attack her physically was never the point, the physical impression she had was never the truth. She seemed human because the entity that attacked her preferred to see herself as human. Willing herself to become as that the Urhalzantrani saw as Death, she grew the greater in size, her face and body changing to mirror that which attacked her save that her horns were dark as the night sky above them, her eyes endless pools of black light.

Her claws too were the color of obsidian, in contrast to the bright green of the monster facing her.

Her wings were not beautiful bird-like shapes but vast pterosaur-like extensions, to match her shape. Her cane had become a great hammer that gleamed with a vicious energy.

The creature that stood before her stopped for a moment.

**_You are mad, that is the only explanation. You attack me as if I am truly the human-like creature you thought I was, a being a child in age to Minerva of Domdaniel, born in the time when Jibr Al-Tariq laid low Spain. I am no woman, creature of two worlds. I am Death, and I am Life. By me all that is in my worlds came into being, life from life. By me all that is ended, and I lock the door on universes and am all that withstands them._ **

**_The forms I wear are constructs created to suit my will. For all that you seek to wield my Name against me, you do not have the power to focus in your madness to wield your insight. Madness cannot overcome that which is not._ **

The creature roared and lunged with one of its claws to rake her face and Death sighed, then and reached out to grab its wrist, the impact creating a tremendous boom. Death's eyes gazed out and she grasped the full nature of what she was holding. 

_**For all your boasting on your power and your nature, you keep this form because in the end, you are a weak little girl longing for your mother, who died by your own hand, and wanting to commit suicide to atone for the crimes you committed to bring yourself into existence. The concept of a fistfight is worth less than nothing to a being like me. We do not need to be the strongest of all things that are or will be, for such is not our nature. But you, little girl, have really pissed me the Hell off and I am sick and goddamned tired of being ripped into like the target of a cornered animal.** _

She drew back her other arm into a clenched fist, as the creature snarled.

_**Do not dare mention Julia Domina to me.** _

The creature's snarl led to her smiling the old sinister grin that she used to wield in her brittle days when she wished to intimidate other lifeforms, as she had in the parliament.

_**I do whatever I please. No rules bind me. Nothing can.** _

In an overpowering booming sound the very material essence of that which was the multiversal Empire of Azarath was rocked on its core, as its very centerpoint was struck a blow that hurled it out of one of its worlds into orbit, Death shaking her fist with a wince.

_**Damn that smarts. Dream is the one who goes and does this kind of thing. Not me.** _

She keened for a moment as the pain in her knuckles intensified, and then blew and saw something that had tried to burrow into them driven out. Her ankh shone with a brilliant light and it was as dust, a dust that she blew away. 

Snorting, she decided to keep the hammer in her hands and to wait.

Each time she had tried to escape the thing had been stubborn enough to seek her doing so. It was mad, and its madness tended to work in a pattern. If she did not try to escape.....

She formed the illusion of herself seeking to do so, and then knelt in a lotus position, drawing on her strength.

What she had seen for a moment and grasped had given her more than a hint. This thing was targeting her because of a resemblance to something that did not live, yet. It was mad, with a tremendous amount of power, but it sought to struggle against a concept as if she were another of the many multifaceted beings that had waged bitter wars against the Superman of Krypton that had come to her in the end raging, raging against the dying of the light.

What she was about to do might work excellently or it might backfire, but either way it would permit her for a change to have the edge in whatever game this creature played. If not that, there was one last desperate element she could try, something that could work. 

Juris, Coman. Names that she knew from her own world. There was an entity that the Azar she'd known and taken thrice and then once more had waged war against. She would, if it came to the very worst, let herself conjure an image and a ghost of that which her Azar had confronted. Of all things of her world it was one of the few she truly hated, so she would rather it not come to that.

For now....she levitated in the lotus position and focused on anchoring herself. The creature had been struck the kind of blow that in its madness it would try to react to again with a physical blow, a vain attempt to hold onto its first form.

It understood nothing of her, and she had no desire to understand anything more of what she faced at present than that which would allow her to bail on this nightmarish hellscape. For now.

Her being drew upon herself, and she let herself focus on something that she had not. If the thing had seen into her mind, she expected it might try to be halfway clever and to tempt her with her first family. It would be an insult she would not take, and she would not let it work. If it tried to be fully clever, she intended to outmatch it. In the land of the blind, she mused, the one-eyed was king.

The only problem was that this particular land of the blind was colossal enough she would have to wield more power than she was accustomed to wield.

 ** _I really, really fucked up somewhere,_** she grumbled. Her stinging knuckle felt soothed again, the painful spikes reverted to normality.

If her upper jaw twitched slightly and her lower one curled into a bit of a frown as she felt the emotions she suppressed for so long boiling up again, she did not let herself admit it.

\-------

Above that world, the creature that had been struck unconscious awoke, the first of her six eyes burning back into full light, and then all of them.

She had sensed that maelstrom, and then her lips parted into a wide smile.

**_I wanted a fight, and I got one. Now......._ **

A constellation of a gaze looked down.

**_So much repression in that one. How much fun might it be to rip all of that off like a bandage on gangrenous flesh?_ **

And with that she was clad not in her armor but in a deel, and she placed her hands before her and dove like a person moving through water, harnessing the full weight of her being. The blow had jolted her into lucidity for a moment, and as long as she had this and such a lovely plaything, she was not going to miss this for the worlds.   



	7. The Mask that Hides:

Death had taken many forms in her time, for always she was shaped by the eye of mortal and immortal alike in what they chose to see. She was an Idea, a Concept, that had no true form, save what others chose to see. Even now she did not take her true form, for she had neither desire nor will to do so. She had seen _something_ in flashes of memories and of the future in the eyes of what had assaulted her. That _something_ shaped what she had resculpted her outer image into being.

One thing did bother her. The thing had skin as pale as hers, though it glowed with a light that was of a nature known to her only from another, in Halls outside Time. Skin that had her pale hue, hair that had a darkness of lesser hue than her own, threaded with blue tiger-stripes like clawmarks. Eyes that were not flowing liquid darkness but bright and burning suns that gleamed with coronas and prominences, nine of them on a face that was larger in portions than anything human. She had changed what of her seemed to be clothes from the more subtle kind of armor it was to a modified version of that which was hers as the Rider on the Pale Horse. There was a cape, too, so reminiscent of those beings from her sphere, though it was a bright neon blue to match that of the creature's own.

The form that mortals chose to see her in was always diminutive, five foot four. Next to her brother Dream she was often dwarfed, especially when he rose to his full height, and so too with others of her kin. She did not mind. The smallness of her size reflected her weariness, and wariness. Here she had grown in scale to match that which had many times laid hold of her person, equal in height, her teeth become fangs no less sharp, ears extending outward with a prominent sharpness. She felt a strange solidity in this shape, but it was no more, she believed, than tapping into the appearance of something alien, and not her.

Above her she could feel the downward-descending blade of the monster that grinned at her with teeth as sharp and as unnaturally white as her own, until the monster saw the form that had arisen on the planet, gazing at it with a grin that in its particulars was in truth the kindly smile of Death and not the kind that the other would have taken. Even in its more deranged moods, let alone the lucid one falling down from the skies, the entity would still have been cautious. It, after all, was able to transcend time and space, which was how on its thousandth birthday it had found a being vingitillions of years old and drawn it into its sphere as a plaything.

The being in black armor with glowing sunfire eyes, it could be what it seemed to be....or it could be that the entity it had taken for a plaything had proven too clever by half.

Sunfire eyes narrowing, relishing the irony of being lucid at this moment, the monster landed on the world that was her, the impact of her feet muted, the planet drawing into her, enhancing her strength and her speed beyond her usual.

The entity that stood before her crossed arms over the breastplate of her armor where an ankh rested....of silver. The six suns that were on the face of the God on the Gilded Throne narrowed, and then her smile became that of a different kind. In her right gauntlet energy threaded as if flowing down veins and capillaries, drawing into a gleaming light that made each portion of her gauntlet shine not like a murdered star but akin to one in its prime.

**_I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last,_ **

**_Firstborn of Chaos, Eldest and Fatherless._ **

**_By my hands is this world upon which we stand maintained,_ **

**_For it is me, and I am it._ **

**_If you are what you seem to be, this won't harm you._ **

**_Nothing that exists, can, after all._ **

Death had mocked the creature that walked toward her for using its power to do mere mundane fisticuffs. She was a concept that governed an entire seventh of the fundamental fabrics of multiple universes. Fists, she believed, were a crude and primitive use of power. 

Then the shining fist slammed into her with an impact she felt, she did not see, and she was hurled clear through two mountains, blood fountaining from a jaw nearly shattered by the impact. She had not seen this strike, and it gave her an experience she had felt seldom, in truth never up to this point when not from her own hand.

 _Pain._ Her jaw hurt. She exerted her full strength to repair it, awed at the sight of cracked teeth and jawbone falling and the sheer amount of _blood_ on her gauntlets.

It took more out of her than she expected but it was done by the time she looked up to see the giant looming over her, though their height remained equal.

It gave her a contemptuous snort, a dual-voiced thunderclap that hurt her ears.

It raised that same gauntlet that had glowed but microseconds ago and wagged its pointer finger.

**_Naughty._ **

Then the creature reached down and jerked her up by her breastplate, bringing them both to eye-level.

She could see the suns burning from its eyesockets, the way its veins were threaded with sickly light, prominences lancing out and searing into her flesh. The thing's veins shared this element, it seemed almost like it had starlight for blood, not the healthy starlight of plasma and magnetic force, but an unhallowed force of something that had died but refused to accept its death and perpetuated a thing that should never have been.

**_You are not her, you will never be. She is my foe to come, not yet born of woman and of that which is sire by blood but not by nature._ **

The thing grinned, its tongue slithering out of its face, a thing of dark blue hue that licked along her cheek in a lascivious manner.

She groaned, great. Now this thing was channeling Jabba the Hutt.

**_If you're going to teach me lessons on the nature of channeling the full weight of power through fists, let this be a reminder._ **

The thing cocked its head. 

**_If you're going to demonstrate that power, do, don't speak._ **

Only then did the thing's eyes notice that her hands were forming runes, and that there was light gleaming beneath its feet. 

**_I am master here!_ **

Death of the Endless smiled in an unkind smile that was more truthfully akin to what held her breastplate in its hands.

_**Why do you think me foolish enough to seek to send you to another place within your domain?** _

The entity stared bemused for a moment and then its eyes widened as a harsh antisound rippled outward and then a pull like that of a Singularity reached out, drawing it into the portal. To Death's genuine bemusement the world she was standing on was drawn into it with it, and much of the material space around her. Reality seemed to corrode, and there was Nothingness, save for her. 

The armor she wore transformed to her usual tank top and jeans, the warhammer to her umbrella.

She looked around with eyes of darkness, glove brushing her chin.

**_Hmm....well, I'm not in a horror movie so I'm not just going to wait around here for whatever else is going to happen, so...._ **

With that her umbrella transformed into a cane, her floppy hat into a top hat, and her clothes into a formal business-suit like garb of mixed black and white.

She took her cane and brought it back like it was a baseball bat, and then with an almighty swing grinned and seemed to stare off into blank space, saying:

_**Superboy-Prime, eat your heart out!** _

The cane _slammed_ into the Nothingness and a gaping maw of shining light opened. Her eyes squinting from its glare, Death of the Endless's wings burst back into full vision and she flew at great speed into the maw.

\-------

In what may have been minutes or centuries from her departure, the Nothingness became dead starlight and a world materialized out of nothing, the core, then the mantle, then the mountains. A Will looked from this space.

Its plaything had vanished, and yet she had shown it a vision. A Temple, a space outside time and place, and a moment in time, or perhaps more truthfully, in Timelessness.

On a Gilded Throne the thing that had clawed its way out of a strange realm where she had been hurled by a being whose nature she had not understood cast her gaze outward, and then she smiled, a cold amusement crossing her face.

 _ **A temple of Azarath?**_ Her right gauntlet brushed her jaw, the pointer finger grinding and throwing sparks where it brushed one of her teeth.

_**There's potential here.** _

Multiple universes acting as one will began to turn their eyes elsewhere, and patterns began to be writ in stone for the first time and for all time to come.

\-------

_Stella Incognita:_

The maw closed and Death of the Endless found herself on a place that was a world, once. It was cold and it was barren, winds howling with a glacial fury.

She had managed to escape that strange hellscape, and yet as she'd arrived, her top hat and suit vanished and she seemed in her usual clothes, gloves reaching into the snow. There was a great weariness on her, and she could feel wounds that had been held shut by determination opening.

Sleep was tempting. It was her brother's realm, after all.

Her eyes closed and on a desolate frozen wasteland, near the bones of a dead species that had long since passed to extinction after a contact with a force of dreadful power that had not even noticed their existence, Death sunk into the land of the Dreaming as it had once been, weariness having its great triumph at last.


	8. Old Familiar Things:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lost to exhaustion and weakness, Death of the Endless gains what she wants most, for a time.

Her body bled on a frozen world, blood turning to ice. She was alone, for a time, isolated, and away from the monster that had sought her and sought, in some strange way to devour her or to turn her. 

Her body bled, but her mind and her very soul was in a place it had been recently, or so it believed. And yet here, again unconscious and bleeding, there were differences. 

\------

_She strode in the Dreaming as she had remembered it in that first universe. Its outer frontiers marked by the Starlight Sea, and beyond that Fiddler's Green, also on its outskirts. The original Fiddler's Green had departed, so she knew, a long time ago and yet she saw him looking at her and tipping his hat. He bowed deeply, and spoke in that low resonant voice:_

**Milady, it has been too long since you have graced us with your presence.**

_She returned his bow._

**_Good to see you, Gilbert._ **

_Fiddler's Green smiled and pointed to a palace._

_Walking, in_ _the_ _Dreaming, could be as fast or slow as one wanted, depending on the dream and the ways the King of the Dreaming did or did not pay attention to a person within its sphere. Here it seemed but five paces and then she was at the doors, where she nodded to the gryphon, the wyvern, and the hippogriff. Before her the doors opened and her hands in her pocket she tried to walk slowly. So long had she wanted this and this time she savored every step, of the old familiar path. Of the opulent Gothic arches of the Dream-Lord's palace, memorizing each and every detail. Her vision swam with tears but she wiped her eyes, seeking to remain dignified. It was familiar, yes, but it was_ real _in a way it had not been and she did not want to question it. Too long had it been since she'd seen this and too short the path to a door. Sigils in a semicircle around its edge. At the lowest edge on the left, a book with chains. At the lowest edge on the right, a swirl of rainbow hue that changed shape when she looked at it and when she did not._

_Above them the sword of Destruction on the left, tall and gleaming with a silvery hue and the red gemstone in its pommel, the golden hilt shining likewise. On the right the golden Heart of Desire, shining and pulsing with a light redolent with wishes and hopes and fears and hatred._

_Above them a helm, insectoid, with a spine attached, part of a skull of a long-dead monster, slain by Dream in the wake of one of a few times he'd been captive. To its right, a hook adorning a ring, jagged-edged and with the smell of iridescent blood seeming to emanate from it and a cold clammy feeling. And above them all, she saw, at the edge of the door her own sigil. The ankh, symbol of life, and her hand went to hers. She touched the black line and felt the pulse of pain from that line and the memory that went with it, her eyes closing. As if in response to some unknown will that was not her own, the door opened._

_A table and around it her family. Destiny at its head, his eyeless face stunning her with an expression she had only seen on him once, the end of his duties when his book was laid down. Her surprise turned to unease when she saw no book in his hand, and her hands trembled against her thighs so she jammed them in her pockets. To his right there was Dream, clad in white, his hair likewise white, and his smile warm and welcoming, as he stood and spoke her name, not her true name, but the name of her Function. A name she had never been called by them since her Exile._

_Then there was Desire, who had moved from a sultry lounging to stepping from xir chair and moving to hold her in an embrace that startled her, and what was worse was the pain and reassurance in that embrace, old wounds awoken but lanced, their agonies subsiding as soon as they were broached._

_Despair tore her face with her hook and it was not to her to smile, but she nodded, and in her eyes was welcome._

_Destruction was in his own seat clad in his armor as he had been once, and his welcome and speaking her name drowned out all other words, her eyes very wide, and then she was on the ground, a force of nature in the form of her younger sister tackling her, knocking her off her feet with the enthusiasm._

_It was not Delight who'd barreled her over, it was Devotion, the successor to Delirium and the form she'd maintained until that day._

SISter _, she said, quietly._ YoU aRE HERe. _Death smiled and then she cried, unashamedly, missing the warmth of the embrace. Dev left her where she was for a time, and then her younger brother came over and helped her to her feet only to pull her into another hug just as powerful and whispering into her ear:_

You were right. We do know what Destiny knows. You have no reason to ask forgiveness of me. We were young and we made mistakes, and we have not seen you in so long. Whatever sin we committed to do this, I hope it's passed. 

_Death's tears became something more inelegant then, the simple forgiveness she'd never dared hope for proving overwhelming and her brother's arms everything she'd hoped they'd be. No coldness of armor, instead her brother's body was warm and welcoming. She then was embraced by one more person, Dream, who for a moment was tall and dark Morpheus, who had towered over her, and as with his second and his third faces had been close to her in ways that only in her past when she had tried to cut her ties with all her family had the loneliness truly driven her. She let herself be held for that moment and then went to the table, where she told them some of her adventures, not sparing the bad parts for to her they were long ago and far off, and all part of an attempt to get back to here._

_Her family, however, heard stories that she had endured with horror and sorrow, Dream moving over to place a hand on her shoulder and Dev holding her. She did not understand, for these had been things she had already endured, and the loneliness at being around family that was not her family, that had a her that was not their sister and who could never fully be with them and love them as they deserved was just life. She talked to them and heard from them, and the bittersweetness of that moment and of their being together slowly changed as she accepted that this was real, not merely a dream-shard where she saw her brother as he had been, and could speak to him. It was all of them._

_Part, a very small part, of the deep hurts within her were healed then._

\------

Her wounds began to close as her being renewed itself, her ankh shining, and the full weight of her power began to repair damage done to her. Even a monster of the sort she'd encountered could not deal damage past a point, though her jaw ached and ached very greatly in a manner that to the unconscious her made no sense. The wounds faded and so did the pain, snow taking on an iridescent hue that gave it a shining light amidst the bones of a dead species and the charnel house of a fallen civilization. 

\------

_For a moment Death's fingers were transparent and she looked at them with bemusement. She did not see Destiny's sudden jolting motion, nor the way he made a low gasp of sorrow. She did hear the noise from the rest of her family and looked at them with fear. Her lower jaw trembled and she felt tears again and then her hand became solid again, and she broke down, her hands holding her face, her wings shrouding her. No, she'd just found them. She would not go back. She had done this long enough, there would be another who could take her place. She continued telling them of her ninth universe, and of a time when she had briefly entertained a relationship with the entity Kismet, after the weeping subsided, when she felt that strangeness again, but more intense. A fog began to creep into the edges of her vision and she shut her eyes and willed it to go away._

_She put the whole of her strength into it....and the fog crept further._

_\------_

Her bones were restored now, jaw no longer sore and in full alignment, ribs whole. The bruises that covered much of her from the impacts and being tossed around were still giving her body a deep silver hue, but that hue was fading, her wing that had been cracked by the impact, the edge at an angle that was unnatural and sharp restored itself with a thunderous boom that would have horrified any who had seen it had anything been living. 

\------

_The fog crept in and it was a thicker fog now, the kind where it would not have been a surprise to have seen a Tyrannosaurid looming from the fog with eyes that shone in starlight, teeth shining and dripping drool from a great height. Her family was now near and now distant, and she felt a tug pulling her back, back to a frozen world left in the ice of its last war. A charnel house, a tombstone, life scoured by its greatest success in that world, one of so many worlds like it. Little wonder that yet another species taking its first tentative steps down that path had seen her brother leave so often. The tug increased but she fought it, reaching through the fog, letting her power shine more brilliantly as a sword of brilliant obsidian hue formed in her hand and sought to cut the tether. It slammed into it with all the strength she could muster but it would not let her go._

_\-----_

Her body jerked and writhed, a line of new blood forming from her heart through her stomach. Her mouth parted, unconscious. The wound did not bleed long and it restored itself swiftly. 

\-----

 _The tether pulled once more and she could feel the hands of her family trying to pull against it and she sought to pull with them and yet it could not be denied. She was called back, her duties not yet done, for one and only one of the Endless had a life truly endless, and her body would never let her go until her true ending came. The tether pulled and she was drawn to a great force that lay in one sense in a world in the snow, frozen blood staining the snow a brilliant silver, wings healed, body unconscious. At another level it was a great jagged_ thing _that parted the material fabric of the world, vast wings of angelic nature covered in eyes shining and other aspects less describable of angles, black and white. Finality and Transition in a paradoxical unity, having height and breadth and her full being dwarfing the very planet, though not nearly so large as what it had drawn into that singularity. That thing seemed to open a gaping maw to absorb her and she fell into it, screaming in grief and in denial._

_\-------_

Death awoke on a world of ice and snow, surrounded by her own blood frozen into shards of ice. 

She was cold, a sensation of normality that made her feel for a brief moment like a person, and she thought she was blind in one eye until she blinked and the frozen blood cracked and sliced the ground like shrapnel. The heaviness of physicality set in and she looked at her gloved hands, realized that she had lived, once more, and had had a dream so real and so wondrous- 

Her hands were real, as was she, and she was in the snow surrounded by her own blood, but no longer sore and in pain. Her wings extended outward and she screamed in grief and denial as she had when she was tugged away. 

She wanted to be with her family, to let another take her place as they had theirs. She could do what she did, yes, and it was a wondrous thing. But there was no reason, now, that there couldn't have been a new Death, one as able as she and as willing as she could be to fulfill her function and to live. 

She remained kneeling for a while, her wings trailing in the snow. She wept tears that froze against her face, and then with wooden motions formed new runes, and took her umbrella and used it as a cane, not from intent or need, merely from wanting to feel something else that was not her. 

Feather-trails and silver blood marked the snow as she stepped, leaving no footprints, and blood that would never scab nor fade. 


	9. Fortress of Eternity:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Death begins to knit the tale of her just-ended universe when she realizes something strange about her host.

_The Fortress of Eternity:_

The place had a name that could have been a boast, in retrospect. Fortress of Eternity. So like and yet unlike the name that Clark Kent of Smallville had given his own base in other snows in another world. The last traces of a dead world and a dead culture. This was a living world, a fortress more nearly the size of a gas giant in solid metal. It was a place of vastness where she came, sometimes, between universes to knit. Especially when her side had a few moments of still aching from that first attack, as had happened in a couple of previous interludes. Here she felt safe, and yet there was something that worried her. Before she had taken for granted this place, this haven, as what it was. There was a power here dense and clean, and yet harsh. Jagged metal that left bodies shorn to bone. 

Unmaking, from something concentrated where its kin were diffuse. 

She had never met the fortress-maker at this point, only one of its servitors, whose skin had a silvery hue. It was a strange kind of being, dinosaurian with sharp claws and an edge to those claws no less sharp. Its face had a Styracosaurid frill, five horns, each long and curved. Eight eyes in a semicircle, teeth long and pointed. 

Death had not truly _looked_ at this being even as she was knitting up to a point of the time when she had left her function and gone to Azarath, where she had been blissfully and gloriously alone, for a time. Been free to indulge herself without anything or anyone seeing her. She just came here, knit, was given drinks of a kind of draught that nourished her and had a strong honeyed taste to it. For the first time she did look. 

Her eyes went wide. 

She had seen this kind of entity just recently, in the visions shown to her by the monster on that golden-ivory world. Dinosaurian creatures in leather jerkins and deels of woven plant-matter. 

Her eyes went wide and she continued to knit, finishing for a time with the image of her brother and Krona, who had found her, of Krona kneeling and pleading with her to show the truth and all that went with it. 

She would pick up with her horror and her laboring to repair the Source Wall afterward. This time she got up and padded quietly behind the servitor, exploring more of this vast place. 

The energy _thrummed_ here, and there was a resonance that had an eerie similarity to the empire-entity where she had been, previously. Those worlds were sick, reflecting the mind that had made them, and they had had that strange duality in that resonance. It was a backdrop thing that only stood out when she was in another universe, for there it was part of the warp and weft of existence and no more stood out than any other reality's innate aspects. Here the thrumming was low and resonant, an infrasound aspect that she could feel in each and every part of her. The architecture was less opulent but this was a residential area and it was designed for those who lived here. Doors varied greatly in size and the hall seemed to alter its physics with each set of paces, yet still she followed. 

No Gothic arches here, and outside the residential areas it was the architecture of battle and destruction, each micrometer of the fortress covered with weaponry and power in interlocking fields of fire. 

She halfway or more than halfway expected them to turn on her and her hair stood on end with that presence but none did. She couldn't speak, then, her mouth gone dry as she continued to follow the servitor's progress. She had gone a very long way, from a residential space to what.....

She was surprised. From there the servitor had gone to a great door, also adorned with sigils. A set of them that repeated in interlocking fashion, too, akin to chain-links. Her eyes went widest at seeing the ankh repeating itself as a motif and then they narrowed.

With a sense of trepidation and audacity she shoved open the door and saw a blinding light. A scrying pool, of glowing molten light like magma and a room of thrones, set in place. Seven of them, only two of them active and the pool showed two of the entities that had departed from them. One a hulking figure of metal and flesh interwoven covering the other, whose power of flames erupted outward in a great domed shield that halted some esoteric energy exchange, a pale woman with dark hair directing sorcery to mislead their foes and to turn them on their own. 

One of them held a being who seemed to be sleeping for a moment, her skin dark as night and her hair a bright molten lava-red, her deel marked with blood and the traces of a hard-fought battle. 

There was another clad in a deel of dark black who turned at her presence and in that moment Death of the Endless froze as she understood _why_ this place seemed to have that strange similarity. She stared at a being equal in height to that which held her captive, skin that glowed brightly enough that her eyes formed a nictating membrane to dull the brightness enough to gaze at what looked at her in turn. Nine eyes like suns blazed from that face, golden stars that shone with an eldritch hue, hair threaded with tiger stripes. The being loomed over her, for her human form was 5'4'', and this entity too was twenty-five feet, built with a great strength and destructive force, sharp teeth gleaming from a face whose lips peeled back, displaying a coloration as dark as her own. Pointed ears extended out from her face, and the entity spoke in a voice of resonant power like a thunderclap: 

_**You have this for now, Firewind, Terminator. I'll get back to you.** _

The pool went silent and the entity looked at her and crossed her arms in front of her chest, leaning her head downward. 

_**Why are you here, in my throneroom? Is there some problem with your accommodations? You have come here to a place marked specifically for temporal anomalies over six thousand and thirty one times. Now, on the six thousandth and thirty second you have come here. Is something wrong with your space, Death of the Endless?  
** _

The voice had a cold power to it that was like and yet unlike the dual-voiced thing that had spoken to her. 

**_T-This place. It reminds me of Azarath._ **

The entity that looked at her had nine eyes narrow, beams of light stabbing into her like blades of searching power. 

**_When were you in my sister's domain?_ **

Death blinked. 

**_I.....just escaped it. It feels like a long time ago but it was not so by the standard of mortals, at any rate._ **

The titan moved faster than the other one did, and Death found herself held up in a telekinetic grip as the light sliced through her, searching for something. 

**_No infection,_** the titan's voice was wary, and suspicious. _**Very few entities can enter Azarath and leave it without becoming ensnared it. And you managed to escape, then?**_

Death nodded. 

The being nodded. 

**_Good. If you are wondering, the similarity is that we share the same father. Energy from the same route, taken down different paths. We are those for whom the stars are right, and as those who are beyond Existence and its walls each of us finds our own niche. Or, if they are like my sister the Butcher we just bulldoze anything we like for the fun of it and call that a niche and nothing lives to have an opinion on the matter. But...you and I share something else in common._ **

**_And no, it's not the sigil from Khemet. I like it as a nod to the Levant without relying on the Magen David that would be a truer one._ **

Her lip quirked. 

**_Too many people would invoke a power that would consume them too readily, for even at the best of our kind's involvement we appraise entire multiverses as other entities do courses at a meal, and can act as impersonally. No individual and no individual world is lightly perturbed by our passing._ **

**_No, the power we share is that of the End of All Things Mortal. The concept that in many and many a tongue that which is my maternal half, the species known in certain worlds as humanity, Man, Mankind, what have you....it calls that concept Death._ **

The last word was a thunderclap and she stared in shock. 

**_That is why you are always welcome here, Endless. We share a power and certain....physical traits. It's nice to see reminders I am not altogether distinct in the great scheme of things. Keeps me humble and too many of my kind view humility as a vice, as if merely possessing power makes us grand for having it because our father's prong made daddy's little squirt._ **

**_So, was there something wrong with the room?_ **

Death stared for a moment open-mouthed and blinking, then shook her head. 

**_No._ **

The entity that looked at her then spoke with a surprising coldness that for a moment made it all too clear that she was kin to the other: 

**_Then return to it, you are not invited to intrude on my counsels, especially when it concerns vengeance for wounds dealt the Fateful Lightning when I was otherwise occupied._ **

She snapped her fingers and Death of the Endless was back in her own room before she even felt reality _lurch._

Her breath whistled out slightly at the recognition of that similarity and then she shrugged. It was true, she'd been here all that time. And had never questioned it. 

Her questions were answered and after the encounter with the other thing she had no interest in stirring new waters. 

Her needles went back to work and she began to form darkness and starlight and to narrate the tale of the universe she had just left. It was a task that occurred beyond time and space and it meant that no story went untold and no life unspoken. 

If only that dream hadn't been so real. 


	10. Epilogue:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thirteen iterations later, on Earth TT-X, a Hypertime spinoff of Earth-12 where Raven joined the Justice League instead of the Titans, a scheme unravels.

_Thirteen Universes Later, World-Tree, Earth TT-X:_

Death had her form as the Rider on the Pale Horse for many reasons. On Earth-Three it was the form expected, for one did not lightly face a world where good and bad were inverted in the form of a teenager. It made too much work and at this point in her life she was far too unwilling to devote that much effort to it. That form, the Worldbreaker, was armored in grey and it watched Raven, of this world, step toward her. More precisely a multiversal force loosely in her form and more a jagged rip in reality. That which was known in various worlds as the Gem. Trigon's terrible swift sword to remake the world. The jagged rip moved, and then she heard her voice rasp with a deep resonant power: 

**You're afraid, that's what this is. You're afraid that she'll remake your sphere. You did that whole routine with that other face to manipulate me into thinking I actually had options.**

Death's gaze was far calmer than she felt. There was an immense amount of irritation there, not least from the idea that once again people might glimpse a mask, as she knew that the Gem believed so, but they never did guess what truly laid under it. Reality trembled at the edge of a crisis, a tether existed but it could be broken. Before, she had not known what it was that she had fallen into. Nor had she recognized it when it appeared again in Azarath and had won for itself an enclave exploiting a name-resemblance and a motif. Hiding that irritation that threatened to boil over into anger, her voice was glacially calm as she stared at the jagged rip that was once a person and could be again. She spoke: 

**_Not afraid for me, for reality itself. What can control me would almost never truthfully do so for the better._ **

The Gem's voice boomed with anger, as she pounded her chest speaking the second clause of the second sentence with part of the rip that was loosely hand and yet not. 

**She is Azar! The Goddess to whom I prayed! Raven may see her as a False Goddess and Pride as Anathema, but it was always me who heard her most. Me, daughter of Time and Night!**

Death's question was simple, and she did not acknowledge the quite literal chest-pounding. 

**_And if you end up a slave frozen to this tree for all existence and left to rot as a sign of your reward?_ **

The jagged rip paused and four eyes were marked by doubt, uncertainty. For a moment the rip remembered where its physical form was, and then it saw what had forced her onto the tree and something of the nature behind it. She seemed almost nauseous and for a moment the rip became the girl it was beneath. The moment passed, and then it snarled again and spread its cape like wings, looming in greater height. Death continued, completely untroubled by the display>

_**You would fulfill your function, but the thing you have always hated is that you are under the control of another.** _

**How can you know this?** The Gem's question was harsh and her form extended outward to grab Death's hair and pull it back, forming a blade that it began to lower toward her face, a display of power amplified by her control of her own realm forcing the Spectre prostrate as well. Death again was untroubled. She had never died when she had taken her own blades to her throat and she had no real expectation that yet another tie to the House of Trigon would do something _this_ time. Her eyes were almost bored as they looked at the rip in reality. She answered her with a sense of warmth in her voice. 

**_I know everyone, daughter of Angela Roth. Do you think that your mother didn't see you as well as them? What would she say to all of this?_ **

The Gem's blade had touched her throat, drawing first a bead of iridescent blood, then a stream. She wanted to hope for that dream to return and to see her first family, but she knew that it would not work as the rip in reality froze. The blade dug more deeply, nicking one of her veins, and she felt a jolt, and almost a thrill at the thought. Then the Gem withdrew the blade and in disappointment she dared not show, Death shook her head. The other entities were released too, she could see them, and saw them rising to their feet. Zauriel shining with brilliant light, the Spectre redolent in misery and choking horror. Death held her throat and shook her head when they went to her, waving them off with a motion. Indeed, the bleeding had already stopped and she bit her lip to not let her deeper emotions through. 

Raising herself to her feet, slightly woozy from the blade, and from the realm's power dampening her own, they saw the Gem freeze as she thought back to her mother and to the times they'd shared.

Then she bent forward, hands on her head, as the thought of facing the disappointment of a being who fit the same description as-

Then a memory crossed her mind. The Cult, the group of heretics that the other Monks had exiled from Azarath. The thing they worshiped fit this description, and that recognition, the reality that the monster had lied to her, made her believe things that were not the case, and the thought of her mother's disappointment at her actions and letting herself be played like this led to her closing her eyes and rocking herself for a moment.

The portal opened again and Death and Hell mounted the pale horse, riding out with Zauriel and the Spectre.

On the World-Tree the energies froze in mid-place and seemed to fade away from Raven, whose mouth returned to a normal human dimension, her fangs shrinking to more normal human teeth. The energies trembled as her eyes remained closed.

Then, on the world-tree, Raven opened her eyes.

As she left Raven's mindscape, Death's smile blazed with ferocity when she turned to the gigantic creature that froze, recognizing that its tether in this multiverse was suddenly waving. 

Its eyes narrowed. 

_**You,**_ she heard the dual-voiced thunder-and-low wanton voice that was breathy and redolent of another atmosphere entirely speaking. 

She gave it a derisory wave and rode onward, as the heroes surged then, and a multiverse was saved. 

For the first time Death was grateful for the assault of the son of Yog-Sothoth, for absent it, she might have found the exact dream she so secretly craved for in the worst possible fashion. Even as she ached to be released of her duties, there were lines she would not cross, and what that virus offered was decidedly one of them. 


End file.
